News
Think your dog looks guilty when he's done something that you consider
to be wrong?You see guilt, but the dog doesn't necessarily feel
it, a new study shows.
By setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to
whether his or her dog had really committed an offense, researcher
Alexandra Horowitz of Barnard College in New York uncovered the
origins of dogs' allegedly downcast mugs.
Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute
a guilty look to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed
guilty. Instead, people see guilt in a dog's body language when
they believe the dog has done something it shouldn't have, even
if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offence.
During the videotaped study, owners were asked to leave the room
after ordering their dogs not to eat a tasty treat. While the owner
was away, Horowitz gave some of the dogs this forbidden treat before
asking the owners back into the room. In some trials, the owners
were told that their dog had eaten the forbidden treat; in others,
they were told their dog had behaved properly and left the treat
alone. What the owners were told, however, often did not correlate
with reality.
Whether the dogs' demeanor included elements of the "guilty
look" had little to do with whether the dogs had actually eaten
the forbidden treat or not.
Dogs looked most "guilty" if they were admonished by
their owners for eating the treat. In fact, dogs that had been obedient
and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed)
owners, looked more "guilty" than those that had, in fact,
eaten the treat.
Thus the dog's guilty look is a response to the owner's behavior,
and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.
The study involved 14 dogs and their 14 owners. The six male dogs
and eight female dogs included six mongrels and eight purebreds
— a Brussel's griffon, two dachshunds, a Tibetan terrier, a
cockapoo, a shi-tzu, a wheaten terrier and a Labrador retriever.
This study sheds new light on anthropomorphism — the natural
human tendency to interpret animal behavior in human terms, Horowitz
said. Anthropomorphism involves comparing animal behavior to human
behavior, and if there is some superficial similarity, then the
animal behavior will be interpreted in the same terms as superficially
similar human actions. This can include the attribution of higher-order
emotions, such as guilt or remorse, to the animal.
Horowitz, Alexandra (2009) "Disambiguating the "guilty
look": Salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour".Behavioural
Processes, Volume 81, Issue 3, Pages 447-452.
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